The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand

Justin Thomas McDaniel's The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk, Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand, published by Columbia University Press in 2011, is a scholarly ethnographic study of lived, everyday Thai Buddhist practice, ghost belief, amulet use and the popular veneration of specific monks, arguing against textbook accounts that treat Thai Buddhism as primarily a matter of doctrine and meditation. McDaniel conducted extended fieldwork in Thailand and reads vernacular, non-canonical religious materials alongside his observation. Its strength is that grounding in what people actually do rather than in normative textual Buddhism. Its limit is that an ethnography of contemporary practice describes a particular time and set of communities, so a claim about historical Thai Buddhism, or about doctrine as taught in monastic education, needs a different kind of source than this study of lived popular practice.